Our RV Adventures

And No, it’s not how many strips you had for breakfast.

Well, the frack stuff is mostly gone and the coil tubing stuff is mostly here. But there are still a few dribbles and drabs of both wandering in and out.

Luckily for me, but unluckily for Art, my daytime counterpart, the big stuff can only be moved on Texas roads during daylight hours. Or at least from one half hour before sunrise until one half hour after sunset.

Which means Art got the brunt of the traffic while my night should be relatively calm.

I mentioned a while back that I was trying to come up with a better gate vehicle sensor. Although our Mighty Mules normally work great, they’re still at the mercy of any RF interference, like we’re seeing at this gate.

Day in and day out, the most reliable system seems to be the old-fashion gas station bells with the rubber hoses, exactly why our previous gate guard company, Gate Guard Services, still uses them.

But with that reliability, comes some problems. Like hundreds of feet of fairly expensive rubber hose. At least if you want the ends out far enough to give you ample warning of an incoming or exiting vehicle so you can…you know…wake up. 

So I decided to combine the best of both the purely mechanical and purely electronic systems.

So I still will use a length of rubber hose as the actual vehicle sensor laying across the road. But instead of running hose all the way back to the bell, I will connect the hose to a mechanical pressure switch.

Available in various pressure sensitivities and costing $20-30, they will momentarily close a switch contact when a vehicle runs over the hose. This way I can just run wires back to the control box.

I can buy a 1000 ft. spool of twisted pair wire for about $50, giving me as much as 500 ft. of warning in either direction, just pulling out as much as I need, and then winding it back on the spool when I’m done at that gate.

And even the control box is simple.  A small plastic box, a wall wart 12v power supply and a couple of buzzer or chime modules with different tones to let you differentiate between ins and outs.  Kind of like the doorbell modules where the front door one goes “Ding Dong” and the rear door goes “Dong”.

If you wanted to get a little fancy, for a few dollars each you can buy those record and playback modules that come in the greeting cards that let you record your own message. Then you could have one saying, “Vehicle Coming In” and the other saying “Vehicle Coming Out”.

So it’s something I’ll be trying out on our next gates later this year.

So what is your Bacon number?

A couple of days ago I was reading an article about the “Six Degrees of Separation” concept. First put forward in the late 1920’s, it says that any two people on earth can be connected by only five other people in between.

And computer simulations done in the 1970’s seem to show that you only need three degrees of separation to connect any two people in the US.

Just to clarify, a ‘degree of separation’ is one person to another. So if I know one person, that’s one degree. And if they know another person, I’m two degrees from that second person. And so on.

There’s even been a couple of games invented that use this idea, the most famous being “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. Which is where your Bacon Number comes from.

The idea is to connect the actor Kevin Bacon to any other actor in as few degrees as possible, but only by using movies they were in.

For example, Kevin Bacon to Elvis Presley. This is an easy one.

Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Edward Asner.

Edward Asner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.

So with Kevin Bacon always having a Bacon Number of 0, that means that Edward Asner has a BN of 1 and Elvis has a BN of 2.

And strangely enough if you want to add in plays (the movies of their day), you can give John Wilkes Booth (yes that one!) a Bacon Number of 5, or even a 4

JWB was in an 1863 production of Macbeth with Louisa Lane Drew.

Louisa Lane Drew was in a 1896 production of “The Rivals” with her grandson Lionel Barrymore.

Lionel Barrymore was in “It’s A Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stuart.

Jimmy Stuart was in “Airport ‘77” with Jack Lemmon.

Jack Lemmon was in “JFK” with Kevin Bacon.

But someone else brought JWB’s Bacon Number down to a 4 with this shortcut.

Lionel Barrymore was in “Right Cross” with Kenneth Tobey.

Kenneth Tobey was in “Hero At Large” with Kevin Bacon.

But another game takes this to a more personal note, with someone picking a famous person from history, and then the rest try to link themselves to that person with the smallest Bacon Number, still using that concept.

For example, Jan and our son Chris, (not sure about our daughter Brandi) met Michael Jackson in Montgomery, AL when he came to the TV station where I worked in the mid 70’s. He was appearing in town and came by the station to do a promo.

So Jan has a BN of 1 to Michael Jackson, and oddly enough, a BN of 3 to Elvis Presley through Lisa Marie Presley.

For me, I was thinking more historical, and was surprised to find that I have a BN of 3 to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.

When I was 9 or 10 I met, shook hands with, and talked to Eleanor Roosevelt when she was on a book tour in Nashville, TN in the late 50’s. So that gives me this.

From me to Eleanor Roosevelt to FDR to Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945. So a BN of 3.

Unfortunately Eleanor did not go to Yalta, otherwise it would have been BN of 2.

But I was astounded to find that I had a BN of 2 to Adolf Hitler from two different directions.

In the mid-60’s my father was working for Boeing on the Apollo project in Huntsville, AL. Boeing had a big party for the employees and my father took me along. When I found out that Werner Von Braun was there, I went and introduced myself in the stumbling German that I was taking at the time. (Hey, at least I didn’t call him a jelly donut like JFK called Berlin)

And since von Braun knew Hitler, that gives this.

Me to Werner von Braun to Adolf Hitler. So a BN of 2.

As for the other path, I mentioned a few days ago that I worked as a Broadcast Engineer at a black radio station (oh the stories I could tell) in Birmingham, AL in the early 70’s, and so got to meet Jesse Owens, the famous Olympic athlete who embarrassed the German athletes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Contrary to popular ‘knowledge’, Hitler did shake Owen’s hand, because the Olympic Committee demanded it, but Hitler did refuse to ‘congratulate’ him.

Me to Jesse Owens to Adolf Hitler. So a BN of 2 there also.

Now that you’ve heard my Bacon Number stories, let’s throw it out to our blog readers.

What’s your shortest BN to a famous person?

Thought for the Day:

Why is it that it takes three men to make a conspiracy, but only one woman?

asdfdsf

Our DirecTV satellite system went down yesterday afternoon about 4:20 and we didn’t get it back until I got home about 5:30 this morning. Turns out that it was partially DirecTV’s fault and partially mine.

Jan and I were watching the news a little bit before I went in to work when suddenly the video froze and we got a ‘Signal Loss’ error message on the screen.

And when I checked the ‘Signal Meters’ on the receiver, I had nothing coming in. Figuring something had maybe bumped or moved the dish, I checked outside.

Nope it was still there and still upright. So just to be safe I checked DirecTV’s website to be sure they weren’t having any problems. And Nope on that.

So as a last-ditch effort since I had to leave in just a few minutes, I unplugged and then plugged power back into the dish. This started it rescanning the sky to lock onto the correct DirecTV satellite.

But when I got to the gate, Jan emailed me that she still didn’t have any signal.  On a hunch I once again checked DirecTV’s website, and found that they now said they had had problems starting at 5:20pm ET, exactly when our problem occurred. But the problem was now fixed.

So now I knew what had happened. When I reinitialized the dish, it started scanning for the correct satellite. But couldn’t find it, so it shut down.

I tried to email Jan on how to fix it but about that time I lost the phone signal here at the gate, so I wasn’t able to tell her. But when I got home this morning, all I had to do was to reinitialized it once again and in a few minutes we had TV again.

After I posted my map graphics showing our possible travels the rest of this year, several readers asked me what program I was using. It’s called Delorme Street Atlas and I’ve been using it since the DOS days.

I have it on my desktop where I use it to plan our travels. But it also runs on the laptop I have by the dashboard. Then it acts as a GPS mapping program guiding us as we travel.

The really neat thing about the program is the overlays it lets you do.

Like this one.

This shows the location of all of the 290 parks that we’ve stay in since we started RV’ing.

And this one show all of the Thousand Trail parks that are available to us.

I also have a number of other overlays, PassPort America parks, Pilot/Flying J locations, and even Places to See.

It’s very easy to use, and let’s you quickly map out a route from Point A to Point B in just a few seconds.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the program seems to be falling by the wayside. For years every January I would get a notice that the latest version of the program was available for purchase.

But last year, along about March right before we were ready to travel for the year, I realized I hadn’t gotten my update. And going to the Delorme website told me why.

Pretty much everything concerning the Street Atlas program was gone. All the blogs, support forums, FAQ’s, everything just ‘poof’.

Turns out that in January 2016 Garmin, the GPS manufacturer, had bought Delorme lock, stock, and barrel. And supposedly the only reason they wanted Delorme was for their highly-regarded satellite phones, so most everything else has been dropped.

So as it stands now, the only version of Street Atlas still available is the 2015 version, which is the one that I’m still using.

At this point, since Microsoft dropped Streets and Trips a few years ago, as far as I know there is nothing else available that will do what Street Atlas will.

But I’ll keep looking.

Looks like our frack is winding down tonight and they should be finished around 2am. Then they’ll start rigging down and moving out with coiling tubing coming in in the next day or so. When I asked one of the Company Men this evening he said we’ll definitely be busy until Jan and I leave here next Wednesday.

Coffee: The Magic Elixir

Coffee helps Jan sleep better. At least when she drinks it at the right time of day.

Jan’s a morning person, usually getting up around 7am. I’m a night person, normally going to bed between 2 and 3am, and getting up around 10-11am.  So this gives Jan four hours of computer access, and time to watch HER shows she’s recorded, i.e., cooking shows and contests, shows about families with a lot of kids, and shows about polygamist families.

Then she starts to doze off around 7:30 in the evening, and later I get her up about 11pm to send her to bed. But after now having had 3 or 4 hours of good sleep, she sometimes has a problem getting back to sleep.

Every since we’ve been RV’ing I get up at 11 and make coffee. I make 8 cups, 2 cups for Jan’s large mug, and 6 cups for my 34oz Bubba Keg. And that’s it for the day.

But since I’ve been working nights on the gate, I’ve been fixing our coffee about 4 in the afternoon, giving Jan her cup then and taking mine into the gate with me.

So now, after having her coffee in the afternoon, she has no problem staying up until 10 or 11 before she goes to bed, and then no problem falling asleep. She’s actually added several hours to her day.

Is There Anything This Stuff Can’t Do?

Guess we’ll be having afternoon coffee from now on.

Thought for the Day:

Charlie Chaplin once anonymously entered a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest . . . and lost!

dfasdfadsf